Na­tional univ film mak­ing con­test to curb rag­ging

LUC­KNOW : To spread aware­ness about the dan­ger­ous ef­fect of rag­ging on stu­dents, the Univer­sity Grants Com­mis­sion (UGC) is launch­ing a na­tional univer­sity film mak­ing com­pe­ti­tion for stu­dents and fac­ulty .

The en­tries can be from uni­ver­si­ties’ de­part­ments and af­fil­i­ated col­leges. The uni­ver­si­ties, through an in­ter­nal se­lec­tion pro­ce­dure, will se­lect the three best en­tries to be sent to the UGC. The films may be doc­u­men­tary/ fic­tion films of about 5-10 min­utes.

The UGC will con­sti­tute an ex­pert com­mit­tee to se­lect three best films from the en­tries and give an award of Rs 5 lakh, Rs.3 lakh and Rs 2 lakh re­spec­tively for the first, se­cond and third best film, reads the let­ter by Pankaj Mit­tal, ad­di­tional sec­re­tary, UGC.

The se­lected films would be the prop­erty of UGC and would be up­loaded on UGC web­site while giv­ing credit to the film­maker. The UGC has asked vice chan­cel­lors to send en­tries from their univer­sity in a pen drive/ DVD to UGC, lat­est by Novem­ber 30, 2017. The UGC is hope­ful that such a cre­ative ex­er­cise will help in curb­ing rag­ging on cam­puses. To pro­hibit, pre­vent and elim­i­nate the scourge of rag­ging, all in­sti­tu­tions are re­quired to take nec­es­sary steps for its im­ple­men­ta­tion, in­clud­ing a mon­i­tor­ing mech­a­nism as per pro­vi­sions and en­sure its strict com­pli­ance, reads the UGC let­ter.

the Supreme Court has banned rag­ging and the min­istry of hu­man re­source de­vel­op­ment (MHRD) has strictly pro­hib­ited it on cam­pus. Yet rag­ging is reg­u­lar in ed­u­ca­tional in­sti­tu­tions of Ut­tar Pradesh.

Ac­cord­ing to the Na­tional Anti-Rag­ging Helpline (1800-18055-22) data, be­tween June 2009 and year 2017, UP reg­is­tered 727 com­plaints of rag­ging, which is the high­est in the coun­try fol­lowed by West Ben­gal (491 cases).

This Au­gust , a num­ber of new en­trants in Hewett Polytech­nic al­leged their se­niors had told them to come to the cam­pus with close cropped hair or ton­sured heads. They al­leged the se­niors’ dik­tat was part of a ‘dis­ci­pline’ (read rag­ging ) fail­ing which new en­trants were tar­geted and at­tacked in the hos­tel at night.